Bookworm Room

Tweet For many years, I’ve thought that people confuse fairly neutral conduct with bad motives, resulting in false syllogisms.  I first came to this conclusion after reading John McWhorter’s wonderful Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America.  Although my memories are a bit hazy about the details of the book, I seem to recall reading [...]

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Tweet Obama was caught during his speech to minority journalists making noises that sounded remarkably like reparations talk: “I personally would want to see our tragic history, or the tragic elements of our history, acknowledged,” the Democratic presidential hopeful said. “I consistently believe that when it comes to whether it’s Native Americans or African-American issues [...]

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Tweet (This is the first in what I hope will be a series of very civil essays examining marriage.  Suek got me started with this idea based on a comment she wrote saying that, well, we need to figure out what marriage is all about.  Planned future essays will involve separating the religious aspect of [...]

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Tweet The most un-rev Jeremiah Wright elaborated today on his various statements during an appearance at the National Press Club. What he had to say was most enlightening since, when he wasn’t prevaricating or deflecting a point with self-deprecating humor, he sounded pretty ugly. Here are a few things that caught my attention: MODERATOR: What [...]

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Tweet Some months ago, the British papers were filled with the story of Shannon Matthews, a little girl who vanished from her home in West Yorkshire, sparking a huge manhunt. She was eventually found, 24 days later, at the home of her stepfather’s uncle. The big shocker, though, was the fact that both her stepfather [...]

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Tweet It turns out that Barack Obama might have been on to something with his bitterness speech. In case you’ve forgotten, he said: You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, a lot of them — like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 [...]

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Tweet Here’s the headline: “Judge admits mistake in kicking whites out of court.” Upon reading that headline, I assumed that this was going to be the familiar story about some crackpot anti-white judge who issued a ruling, a la the Jeremiah White mode of thinking, that blacks can’t get a fair trial with whites around. [...]

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Tweet At American Thinker, James Edmund Pennington definitively explodes the myth that Obama is a “post-racial” candidate. In other words, Geraldine Ferraro had it absolutely right when she said, without any of Pennington’s careful analysis, that Obama ascended as quickly as he did solely because of his race. And as Pennington points out, that ascension [...]

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Tweet Many have commented on the fact that Barack Obama, both in his race speech and in interviews he gave after the speech, threw granny to the wolves, painting the woman who raised him, not only as a racist but, negatively, as a “typical white person.”  The way in which he did this was to [...]

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Tweet I found myself in the car yesterday afternoon listening for perhaps the 30th time to an episode of Avatar being played on the car DVD. I happen to think that Avatar is a rather unusually good kids’ show. Since this was routine car pooling, with the same passel of tired and cranky kids getting [...]

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Tweet The AP is diving into damage control, assuring us that, not only is Pastor Wright just your ordinary black improvement activist, but his style of rhetoric is dying away anyway: As shocking as they may be, the provocative sermons of Barack Obama’s pastor come out of a tradition of using the black church to [...]

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Tweet In that portion of the speech in which he refused to disavow Wright by comparing Wright to his grandmother, Obama essentially “forgave” his grandmother for the “sin” of being worried about seeing black youths on the street as she walks by.  I kind of ignored that attribution when I said Grandmother Obama never bad-mouthed [...]

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Tweet In my look-see at Obama’s speech, I sort of backed my way into saying that Obama’s speech basically just gives credence to the black sense of victimhood. Thus, at the end, I noted that I could bored and tuned out because Obama started bloviating about the same old cycle of poverty and victimhood which, [...]

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Tweet As is always the case with me for any speech, especially an Obama speech, I’ve opted to read it, not listen to it, so that I can have the best sense of the words themselves, without getting sidelined by someone’s rhetorical style (or lack thereof). Obama opens by talking about the promise of the [...]

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Tweet Yesterday, the print news, the blogosphere, and the radio world were filled with stories about the MSM’s sudden discovery that Obama’s spiritual mentor is a very angry man, who speaks hatefully of whites and of the United States of America. The common conclusion: Jeremiah Wright is a racist, and it doesn’t help Obama’s broader [...]

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Tweet God bless Geraldine Ferraro for pointing out the obvious, which is that a slightly corrupt, vapid (albeit intelligent) neophyte could never have risen as fast and as quickly as he did in politics if it hadn’t been for the fact that he has the skin color the media is looking for in a presidential [...]

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Tweet Here it is, my first day back from a long-ish vacation, and I’m not finding any blogging inspiration in today’s news. Instead, it’s exactly the same stuff that was in the news when I left: unrest in Pakistan; Hillary’s free-fall; alleged campaign shenanigans from the Hillary camp aimed at the Obama camp; Obama’s problem [...]

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Tweet My post title imagines what I bet a lot of the older generation of Jewish Americans will think when they learn about the latest campaign tactics from the party that knows how to do identity politics. Steve Cohen, whose name is a giveaway as to his Jewishness, is running for reelection in Tennessee’s 9th [...]

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